A Response to Dr. James Hughes’s “Problems of Transhumanism: The Unsustainable Autonomy of Reason.”

The last two paragraphs of Dr. Hughes’s remarks provides the best opportunity to engage him in conversation. Here, he provides a comparison between the transhumanist definition of reason and a pre-Enlightenment explication by examining two houses floating in mid-air. The pre-Enlightenment house (reason) is a “ramshackle huts of mud daub and random flotsam, tied up with string..,” surely not a very functional facility, while the Enlightenment house (reason) is a “..pure, lean precision of Reason we have built our houses of Kantianism, utilitarianism, liberal democracy and other clean architectural marvels . . . ”

Here, clearly, we have a man in revolt (psychopathology) against the tension described by the Classical Greeks, Platonists, and Christian thinkers as a connection between Reason and existence in openness to the ground, raised to consciousness. Reason, then, is differentiated as a form existing in reality predicated on a “faith and trust (pistis)” in a cosmos ordered by the divine, in love (phila, eros) and exemplified by Augustine’s “amor Dei.” Further we can say that “Reason” is an openness toward the totality of reality (Bergson’s “l’ame ouverte”) where as for Dr. Hughes “Reason” exists not as a mode within the “tension of existence” rather as a structure existing in a self-contained immanence. Dr. Hughes has taken a position in apostrophe, a turning away from the ground, and in so doing is turning away from “self,” The ramifications of such an act are clearly described by the Greeks and Romans in terms of experiencing “anxiety” and ignorance (agnoia echon) where the condition limits true insight (phronesis) and acts to release or fails to contain “desires” and “passions” (here we might argue that the derailment describes intellectual “passions”) and reaches denouement in a condition of fear, and frenetic behavior predicated on a loss of direction; the loss of self.

The good news is that Dr. Hughes’s essay is illustrative of a person in the condition of “questioning unrest,” where he writes, “Acknowledging that we are all in mid-air and don’t know how we got aloft in the first place is damned scary . . . .” I realize Hughes’s comments aren’t exactly representative of a philosopher acknowledging that he is in a condition of searching, questing, seeking but here we might give the man the benefit of the doubt. Consequently, the question is will Dr. Hughes follow “the attraction to the ground and unfold into noetic consciousness,” or will he ignore the ground and continue in his attraction to the psychopathological derailment that is Enlightenment “Reason?”